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with the tails of their pugarees drawn across their faces like veils. Raj looked for telltale signs: their hands, the wear on the hilts of scimitars and carbines, the way they sat their dogs, how often they had to check or spur to keep their dressing.
    These lads have been to school. Their commander was a stocky man, one of the ones with the tail-end of his turban drawn across his face. Scars seamed the backs of his hands, and another gouged down from forehead to nose . . .
    . . . and his eye was unmoving on that side. Tewfik. Raj cursed to himself. With a glass eye for once, rather than his trademark patch. He’d met the Colonial commander once, in a parley before the Battle of Sandoral, four years ago. What’s he doing there? It was a job for a minor emir, not the commander-in-chief.
    An image flickered through Raj’s consciousness, tinged somehow with irony: himself, leading the 2nd Cruisers through the tunnel under Lion City’s walls.
    Point taken, Raj noted dryly.
    The white dust of the road shone ruddy with the setting sun, streaked with the long shadow of the tall cypresses planted by its side. They came to the outer gatehouse of the city’s defenses, where the highway crossed the moat on stone arches. Civil Government troops opened the iron portals: infantrymen, slovenly-looking even for footsoldiers. Raj ground his teeth at the rust on one man’s rifle barrel. They eyed the Colonial troops with the prickly nervousness of a cat watching a pack of large dogs through a window. Heldeyz saluted their officer and opened his mouth to speak.
    Tewfik drew his revolver and shot the man in the face.
    A red spearhead seemed to connect the Arab’s hand and the guard officer’s nose for an instant, and then the footsoldier jerked backward as if kicked in the face by an ox. His helmet rang against the stone of the gatehouse, the last fraction of the clank lost in the snapping bark of carbines as the Colonials cut loose with their repeaters. They boiled forward, screaming in a wild falsetto screech. One of the Civil Government soldiers managed to get a round off, the deeper boom of his single-shot rifle painful in the confined space. Then he went down under a Colonial officer’s yataghan, still stabbing upward with his bayonet.
    The fight in the gateway lasted bare seconds, leaving Heldeyz and the city fathers sitting their dogs and gaping at the litter of bodies. Puffs of off-white smoke drifted by; the Colonials were wasting no time. Dozens of them stuck their carbines through gunslits in the doors and fired blind, as fast as they could work the levers, sending a lethal hail of the light bullets to ricochet off the stone walls within. Hand-bombs and axes pounded the doors open. The rest of the Colonial force formed a dense four-deep firing line at the inner gate, thumbing reloads from their bandoliers into the loading gates of their weapons. Heldeyz’s head whipped around at the high shrill scream of a Colonial bugle.
    Mounted men were pouring out of the orchards that ringed the city, spurring their dogs. The animals bounded forward at a dead run, covering the ground in huge soaring leaps as they galloped with heads down and hind legs coming up nearly to their ears on every jump. Rough hands threw the courier aside as the column poured into the strait confines of the gatehouse and broke out into the cleared ground beyond; a battery of pompoms followed, their long barrels jerking wildly as the gunners lashed their dogs. Iron wheels sparked on the paving stones, and behind them the roadway was red with crimson djellabas . . .

    Barholm’s fist hit the table as the courier’s words stumbled into silence. He didn’t have Center’s holographic visions to flesh them out, but there was nothing wrong with his wits.
    “They knew the wogs were there in force and they didn’t keep a better guard than that?” he said.
    “Sole Autocrat, the garrison was under-strength and badly trained,” Raj said quietly. “In any case,